I have never wanted to kill anyone as much as I wanted to kill the son of a bitch in front of me right now.

He's standing thirty, maybe thirty-five feet from where I'm lying hidden in the reeds and mud of this marsh. Not the easiest shot in the world but not the hardest, either, and I've got a submachine gun set to three-round burst to help my chances, and I've got his head in my sights, and all that remains now is for me to get on with it, to get down to business. I've been lying here for almost four hours, feeling the autumn cold seep up from the wet earth and into my body, waiting for this moment, waiting to close the trap. Waiting for this.

Right now, in this moment, his life is mine.

I can't pull the trigger.

I list all of the reasons he must die. I conjure the faces of his victims, the small handful of them that I know about. The neighbor who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and suffered for it; the reporter who died as preamble to more death; the friend, stabbed in the heart while I watched, too far away to save him. He died in my arms, a good man who left this world too early in fear and pain.

Three people, all of whom had the misfortune to know me. Three murders added to the sea of the dead that this man now in my sights has caused. That's what he does, you see, he murders. He does it for money, and he does it so well and so carefully that he's considered one of the ten best professional assassins working in the world today. One of The Ten, they call him, the same way they call him Oxford because they don't know his real name.

My finger refuses to budge.

I give myself more reasons to kill him. The least of them is the gun that Oxford is holding in his hands. That gun-or at least its bullets-is meant for me, and for the woman I have given my word I will protect. The woman who has both destroyed my life and recreated it. The woman who, like Oxford, can bring death like birdsong on a breeze, who they call Drama because they don't know her real name.